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19. Thor: The Dark World. The only MCU film I haven’t even finished. I got bored halfway through and turned it off–it was predictable, irrelevant, and trying too hard to be something it didn’t have to be. By far the weakest Marvel movie.

18. The Incredible Hulk. There’s a reason Hulk never got another stand alone movie after the first year of the MCU. Not awful, but also predictable and pedestrian. Also, Edward Norton.

17. Iron Man 2. The MCU’s flagship character returned with a pretty meh sequel where the internal and external conflicts are both so forgettable that they’ve literally never been mentioned again.

15. Iron Man 3. By this point, the ongoing soap opera arc of the MCU was well under way, and this entry provided a nice small-scale opportunity for Tony Stark to get some of the lasting character growth that Iron Man 2 oddly only played around at creating. Super derivative, though.

14. Ant Man. We’re in the realm of really good movies now, and this one captures the fun of the MCU as well as anything else. Another standard template is at work here–not all that different from Iron Man–but Paul Rudd is a joy to watch, and where this movie is “fill in the blanks” in its structure, it gets creative with the details, allowing itself to never take itself too seriously.

13. Doctor Strange. Yet another movie where the details are creative–the gorgeous visuals alone make this movie worth it, and they’re even organic and solidly integrated–but the narrative is generic. Strange’s hero’s journey is forced, but everything about him is forced, like at beginning when we see that he has a complete mastery of obscure pop music trivia, which never gets mentioned again. It’s like the screenwriters said, “OK, he needs some random quirk in Act I, then we can move on…”

12. Captain America: The First Avenger. The skill of the MCU is to take their formula (and by now I hope we see that Marvel is a very formulaic outfit) and just use it with as much pop energy as possible. This genuinely rousing movie is the zenith of that art, with all the wholesome “gee whiz!” spectacle of the Superman movies of the 80’s. Also, Hugo Weaving.

11. Avengers: Age of Ultron. I remember one review of this one saying that it was a miracle it was any good at all, what with all the pressure and competing agendas at work here, and while that may be true, the consistent success of the Russo brothers in making movies even better than this one proves that it’s possible. Joss Whedon is a genius, but even genius can be overrated. Still, this Avengers outing was a solid follow up and immensely enjoyable. Also, James Spader.

10. Guardians of the Galaxy. Even more fun and even funnier than Ant Man, this is the movie that proved that Marvel could make a great popcorn movie out of anything. Continue reading →

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The world doesn’t need yet another review saying the obvious, but I finally just watched it today, and holy moly, this movie is awful.

It’s a tedious, leaden, pompous, plodding mess of a movie. The dour, somber tone isn’t even level–it bounces around in degree every few minutes. Ditto for the pacing–mostly too slow (especially at the beginning), it often veers into quick summaries of scenes with hardly any context or relevance.

This movie breaks every known rule of grammar in the language of film!

Director Zack Snyder wants so badly to be the love child of Terrence Malick and Stanley Kubrick, but he just doesn’t know how to consistently balance his work like them.

Jesse Eisenberg’s version of Lex Luthor is just garbage. Seriously, who decided every interesting Hollywood character had to be ADD-addled and awkward? Eisenberg’s not a bad actor, so I blame this one on Snyder, too.

Why was Wonder Woman there? Her presence is never really explained. She was on Luthor’s trail because…plot?

Did the Cinema Sins video for this movie have a Scowling Eyebrows Bonus Round?

Like the Star Wars prequels, the most infuriating part is that there’s clearly the kernel of a much better movie in here. How sad this opportunity got wasted.

Ugh. Congratulations, Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. You’ve just entered the dubious pantheon of films that literally made me angry while watching them: Alien 3 and Batman and Robin are also members.

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I’m a big fan of the Christian movies Fireproofand War Room, so I was looking forward to Facing the Giants, which looked like basically the same thing, but with high school football.

The other two movies have actual struggles and hard change and some serious real world difficulties in them…but not Facing the Giants.

In the first act of this movie, we see all the things wrong in the life of a losing football coach at a private Christian school: a failing job, a broken down house and car, infertility. Then he decides to turn his life over to God more fully, and suddenly everything magically turns around. He gets a new car. His wife gets pregnant. His team wins the state championship.

No, I don’t have a problem with the concept of miracles, but I don’t like a story where it’s that easy, or that selfish.

This movie turns God into Santa Claus, just waiting for us to say the right words politely enough before showering us with all the toys we want.

The big change he makes as a coach is really just doing his job a little bit better than before. And merely for that, a player’s father buys him a new car. What a materialistic gospel this movie preaches! It’s the definition of cheap grace.

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I recently saw last year’s film, Risen, about a Roman officer tasked with finding the “stolen” dead body of Jesus Christ.

It was good, but not great. Here’s why:

I liked the unique take on a familiar story–turning the Resurrection into a detective case–and I loved the great production values.

But…but…but…

The macguffin here is always referred to as “Yeshua,” which is historically accurate (a plus), but which is clearly used here so the film can avoid saying “Jesus” all the time, so it won’t appear to be one of those movies–the kind that always get hammered on Rotten Tomatoes (a minus).

Such a love/hate relationship with its subject is typical of Hollywood’s approach to the Bible in the 21st century.

Still, the content of the film is strong enough to warrant giving it a try, I suppose. I especially appreciated the very realistic depiction of the Crucifixion (not nearly as romanticized as in The Passion of the Christ), and the fact that the film starts with that. Bold.

But Joseph Fiennes’ protagonist is too flat to care about–another sadly typical trait of such films, be they faith-promoting or secular. In the first half, he’s a grim stoic. In the second, he’s a wide-eyed convert, like the other hippie-apostles around him.

Finally, about an hour after watching it, I realized why I ultimately didn’t care about the film: it didn’t make me feel anything. This is a movie for the head, not for the heart. Maybe for some, that’s a feature, not a bug.

But for me, in a movie about the Savior’s greatest miracle, it’s an unforgivable sin.

A: Rogue One is a worthy entry in the series; however, just as it comes between the two existing trilogies in the timeline, it comes between them in quality, as well.

The Empire Strikes Back 2. Return of the Jedi 3. The Force Awakens 4. A New Hope 5. Rogue One 6. Revenge of the Sith 7. Phantom Menace 8. Attack of the Clones

Don’t let that low ranking fool you–it’s only because the films above it are so awesome. Rogue One is a terrific bit of entertainment.

This is my purely subjective preference, though. Actually, I think that, as a film, Rogue One is better made than The Force Awakens.

Q: Is this film really dark?

A: Yes, though it’s not a tragedy–it’s a tale of triumph in the face of overwhelming adversity. But here’s the thing: this movie is an experiment. Disney wants to see if the Star Wars universe can support different kinds of stories. I think the risk totally paid off.

But they’ve given us something new here: there’s no gee-whiz childlike wonder in this movie. This is a gritty film about adult choices; it’s a meditation on redemption through sacrifice for a greater good. Thematically, tonally, structurally, it’s not at all like most Star Wars movies. It is, however, closest to The Empire Strikes Back.

I read one review that likened it to Ocean’s 11. That was dumb. It’s much more like Saving Private Ryan. In a good way.

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I enjoy a good horror movie, but I hardly ever see any. I avoid excess in gore, profanity, and nudity: all things in which horror loves to overindulge. Besides that, though, most horror movies just aren’t very good. Is there another genre in which the worthwhile-to-garbage ratio is so high?

So imagine my joy to hear about The Babadook, last year’s Australian indie hit. I recommend it here not only because it passes the tests of my above criteria, but because it’s simply a wonderful film, period.

Start with the lead. On the strength of this performance, she should get a slew of Hollywood offers now. If this film had been made in Hollywood, she’d’ve been up for an Oscar.

Movies are full of struggling single moms, but I’ve never seen one look so legitimately haggard. Plenty of reviews have noted that this is a film about the persistence of grief, and they’re right.

But in our heroine’s beleaguered existence lies more than grief. She’s a nearly all-encompassing conduit of suburban social ills: regret, shame, ostracism, inadequacy…who can’t relate to some aspect of her plight? I’ve never seen the harsher strains of parenthood portrayed so bracingly.

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First things first: here’s my ranking of the Mission Impossible series, from best to worst: 4, 5, 3, 1, 2. Yes, this new movie comes in 2nd place overall, just edging out the J.J. Abrams-directed third film, in 3rd place, but not quite reaching the perfect popcorn heights of Brad Bird’s flawlessly fun fourth entry, Ghost Protocol.

I think we can all agree that the only really bad film in the series has been the second one. What garbage that one was! I didn’t like the original when it came out, either, but upon rewatching it last year, I was surprised at how well it had aged. Or maybe it was because of how well I had aged. Either way.

If I had to summarize what makes Rogue Nation work so well, it would be this: loyalty vs. subversion. RN works in commentary on a few themes, but none so much as loyalty. It does this both by bald exposition and by narrative subversion, contrasting the two ideas.

(And I like my popcorn flicks to have just a little of that substance to them, and good action movies these days do it quite well, embedding the ideas they illustrate quite organically, and making those ideas more meaty than those in an after school special, but not exactly trying to be Nietzsche. Chris Nolan is also very good at this–The Dark Knight Rises is even better than most people gave it credit for.)

The subversion in Rogue Nation is both a plot point and a narrative method–nobody likes supposed mysteries that cheat you with contrived twists or random reveals, but those here are neither. I like how the subversion isn’t just the inevitable betrayals that we see in the MI franchise’s stories, but direct the viewer to examine their own conception of the format. This starts with the trailer, which very cleverly misdirects us.

On the commentary track for an old Simpsons episode, the writers talked about how consciously they tried to do that with the series, to subvert expectations in a way that illuminated for the audience expectations they didn’t know they had. That’s the source for a lot of the show’s classic humor. Such a technique is used here for suspense and resolution.

It should be noted at this point that Chris McQuarrie, who wrote and directed this movie, also wrote The Usual Suspects.

[One more comment, but it’s a big spoiler, so don’t scroll down unless you’ve seen the film.]

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The Lego Movie features voice talent from three of the best shows of the last ten years: Arrested Development (Will Arnett), Community (Alison Brie), and Parks and Recreation (Nick Offerman and Chris Pratt). It also stars Liam Neeson. Oh, and Morgan Freeman.

Lots of movies are about the importance of teamwork. Lots of movies are about the importance of individuality. Most of them aren’t even very good. But I don’t think there’s ever been a movie celebrating BOTH teamwork and individuality. And both themes are fully developed! That’s an impressive act of compositional acrobatics right there.

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For all the hyperbolic praise lavished on it and all the interpretive controversy surrounding it, here’s what I took away from finally seeing Disney’s Frozen last week: it’s very good, and decently thought provoking, but it is neither one to the degree that everyone says it is.

The animation and music are excellent, though not unusually so–Frozen is great in those ways, but it is not a masterpiece. For example, the symbolism of Elsa’s power is muted in vagueness–the simplest explanation of Elsa’s power is that she’s merely an introvert.

And this is where the characterization in the film went off track. (Warning: spoilers ahead; on the off-chance that you’re even more out-of-the-loop than I and still haven’t seen it, the following may not make much sense, anyway.)

The whole concept of the film is that Elsa is different. Hardly revolutionary stuff in storytelling, but the plot makes it clear that Elsa doesn’t have anything against people, but her nature makes it hard to be around them. Her sister, on the other hand, is a social butterfly.

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I was interested in the work of Terrence Malick after seeing Tree of Life. As I started watching his much earlier film Days of Heaven, I was at first reminded of Ron Howard’s Far and Away: young lovers brought together and separated by the the trials of pioneer life in an earlier American era, set against the gorgeous backdrops of that unsullied wilderness.

But where Howard’s movie was a fun bit of pop celluloid, Malick’s is art.

The style is wholly ambitious. Not unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey in this sense, he uses dialogue sparsely, and constructs a deceptively simple plot. Much of the film’s meaning is communicated symbolically through the physical environment on which the story is imposed.

Days of Heaven begins in fire: the furnaces of a factory and the violence that attends them. After this prologue, we enter the paradise promised in the title; indeed, the story’s central act is truly a season of heaven on earth, one of those times in life where everything is perfect and you just lose yourself in the rapture of it all.

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I got out of the habit of keeping track of what I watched last year. I’m back in it, but for now, here are the first 12 movies I can remember seeing for the first time last year, in alphabetical order:

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

So much swashbuckling fun! Actually saw this as a little kid, but couldn’t remember much about it; watched this with the fam now, and everybody loved it. Errol Flynn is the perfect Robin Hood (“You speak treason!” “…Fluently.”)

Strange to contrast this with 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, a movie so bad I hadn’t bothered to see it again since then, and when I did this year, I thought it was even worse. From the constant hero shots of Costner’s mullet, to the weird ways they contort their own screenplay to find excuses to use Morgan Freeman’s character, this is a sad, obvious bunch of clichés. What a joke. At least Alan Rickman knew enough to ham it up.

10/10 (the 1938 version!)

Babette’s Feast (Danish, 1987)

My main train of thought watching this was how different–and how much worse–this would have been as an American production. In a Hollywood version, Babette would have been a sexy cougar whose metaphorically erotic orgy of food would have “liberated” all the “narrow-minded prudes” around her, freeing them all to “be who they really are.”

As it is, Babette’s Feast is far more subtle, realistic, and, therefore, moving.

8/10

Ikiru (Japanese, 1952)

Honestly, I didn’t see what the big deal about this Kurosawa classic was for most of the film. Sure, it was poignant and beautiful, but not earth-shatteringly so. Until the final act. That daring bit of directorial bravado–where tipsy mourners at the protagonist’s wake review his final days, intercut with scenes of the great living in question–profoundly impressed me. Genuinely insightful and impressive.

Another contrast with a hypothetical American version: in Hollywood, Watanabe would have had a love affair with Toyo in the second act, finding his passion for life in the arms of a young woman. How sad that we’re so predictable.

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I just got home from seeing a marathon of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films, including the new one, and I have to work out some thoughts. I kept this spoiler free, but most of these ideas will make more sense after you’ve seen it, which (spoiler alert?) I strongly recommend you do.

The biggest question, of course, is how good is it? Does The Dark Knight Rises live up to the other films, especially the second? Certainly it’s an excellent work, and I’ll be honest that my preference is for the new film (even though I eventually loved The Dark Knight), but I’m fairly confident that most people will say that they thought The Dark Knight was even better. Most fans of the series will still opt for its darker, more complex vision. Fair enough.

But consider that they are very different movies. TDK was a dense, episodic thriller. In fact, watching it again during tonight’s marathon, I was struck by just how much ground Nolan covered. TDKR, however, is a more linear narrative, with a single focus, albeit one that constantly crescendos to an emotionally explosive climax. Where TDK packed in as much of everything as possible, TDKR actually goes out of its way to strip down the distractions of excessive characters and subplots so it can develop its primary interests as much as possible.

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I say that the best James Bond movie was 1963’s From Russia With Love. My favorite scene is the fight on the Orient Express.

The trend in film has always been for fights to become more and more stylized, but this fight scene is the perfect balance of choreography and brutal, realistic brawling. Add to that the fact that the scene is done in a confined space, in the dark, and you’ve really got a classic action achievement here. Just shy of half a century has passed since this one came out, and it’s still one of the best fight scenes ever shot.

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Checked this out from the library a while back and really enjoyed it. This drama not only has better production values than most small, Biblical movies, but it even stars future Grey’s Anatomy lead Patrick Dempsey, to boot.

Jeremiah tells a vivid story of the Old Testament prophet’s reluctant, melancholy rebellion against a corrupt and complacent status quo, and keeps the major narrative very faithful to the Biblical text. Dempsey shines in this role; his acting strong suit has always been an uncanny ability to convey betrayed surprise–the hurt look on the face of a lost puppy dog. That woeful innocence comes in handy a lot as he portrays the saddest prophet in Israel’s history.

Latter-day Saints have a special soft spot for Jeremiah, I think, as the Book of Mormon suggests that he was a contemporary of the first patriarch in that sacred text, a man named Lehi, who likewise foretold doom in Jerusalem and was violently rejected for it. One can easily imagine Lehi preaching just around the corner in most scenes of this film.

The few shots of violence are tasteful and true to the source material, but perhaps a little too intense for the youngest viewers. Other than that, anyone with an interest in Biblical literature, history, or belief would be better off for seeing Jeremiah.